There was a really interesting article in last month's Wired about
the Wii, Guitar Hero and iPhone as our realization of virtual reality that I mentioned at the
PSFK Good Ideas in Digital Salon the other day and thought I should link to here.
Essentially the idea is that in the early days of computers we imagined a virtual world where we put on big goggles and walked around this funny universe. As Levy explains in the article, "Turns out you don't need total immersion to interact naturally with a digital world: The games of Wii Sports allow you to perform the same actions you do in the athletics they simulate. When you're hitting a Wii golf shot, you simply swing the remote like it's a five iron. Tennis? Swing the Wiimote like a racket — its accelerometers and sensors translate to digital. Because your gestures are totally intuitive — no disembodied strangeness — you can focus on the screen the same way you would zero in on your opponent across the net."